I could see the National Laboratory from the overlook, a honeycomb of white buildings crawling with radiation signs and what my father used to call “the real monsters.” I’d come up here to put some perspective between myself and the codebase on my desktop, but even above the noise of the cicadas and the oxygen debt, my mind kept running simulations, scoping edge cases, mentally pen-testing the world.
The canyon made no secret of its age. Every ledge was scored with the fossil memory of violence from ancient rivers, lava flows, and the incremental predation of frost. Erosion had sculpted amphitheaters in the rock, each big enough to swallow a football field, but at the bottom, there were always cigarette butts and the crusted evidence of too many teenage beer runs. The grandeur of geology, undermined by the dogged persistence of human garbage.
I followed the main trail, unspooling a quarter mile above the river, until the familiar feeling of ground betrayal. My right foot landed on a patch of loose scree, the kind of micro-rocks that behave like ball bearings. Gravity conspired with inertia. My boot shot out, and I pitched sideways, the cheap plastic water bottle arcing from my hand as I windmilled for traction. I hit the ground hard, the impact compressing the air from my lungs and scraping my forearm on a jagged root. A rolling, scraping slide followed, ending with my ankle jammed against the gnarled base of a juniper, everything below my knee hot and abstract.
I stayed perfectly still, just for a second, as my brain ran the inventory. Banged up, but nothing catastrophic—no splintered bones poking through skin, no arterial spray. I sat up and watched the fine red gravel patterning my hiking pants, thought about how much work it would take to launder the stains out. The familiar numbness at the base of my skull, shock’s old friend, set in almost immediately.
The canyon’s hush was enormous, swallowing every sound except for my own pulse, until it was not. The motorcycle announced itself as a distant, insectile whine, amplifying into a warping bellow as it rounded a blind curve two hundred yards below. It was out of place here, in the wild, among the hawks and the wind, as if some apex predator had stumbled into the wrong habitat.
I tried to stand, failed, then tried again with more calculation and less pride. My ankle screamed in protest, but held. I could bear weight if I adjusted my center of mass, walked with the practiced limp of someone pretending not to be injured. I pressed dirt from my palms, yanked my water bottle from the underbrush, and prepared to resume the hike as if nothing had happened.
The bike crested the last incline and cut its engine. The echo of the pipes pinged off the basalt for several seconds, settling into silence so absolute it might as well have been preordained. The rider dismounted with mechanical economy, every movement frictionless and premeditated. Black helmet, mirrored visor, a jacket that looked like it belonged in a law enforcement evidence locker. He unsnapped the chin strap and pulled off the helmet in a single, continuous gesture.
I recognized him instantly, despite—or because of—the patch. Bloody Scythes MC, the local chapter, was synonymous with every rural tabloid horror story about extortion, murder, or the more creative forms of community outreach. He was older than I remembered from the news photos, face more scar than flesh, but the posture was the same. No wasted motion, eyes that scanned and measured. The kind of man who would either rescue you or bury you, depending on which made the most narrative sense.
He saw me, cocked his head, and in a voice like finely ground glass asked, “You good, ma’am?”
The question was too polite, too measured. I felt the old wariness flicker on, all synapses conditioned to expect a predatory game.
“I’m fine,” I said, voice calibrated to the neutral frequency of the scientist and not the scared girl. “Just a slip. Trail maintenance is a joke.”
He didn’t buy it. Or maybe he did, but found it unworthy of response. He swung the helmet under his arm and started walking up the incline, boots sending up tiny puffs of ochre dust. He moved like someone who’d spent most of his adult life dodging bullets. There was a burn scar across the left side of his jaw, an old one, the edges shiny in the late light. He could have been any age between thirty-five and infinity, depending on which line you traced on his face.
I steadied myself and tried to project a sense of inviolability. The trick was to make yourself appear not worth the hassle—neither prey nor challenge, just another problem for someone else to solve.
When he was twenty feet away, he stopped. “You don’t look fine,” he said. His tone was neither mocking nor kind, but something more clinical. “You want a hand or not?”
I wanted to say no. I wanted to invent a friend, a boyfriend, a soon-to-arrive search party. Instead, I nodded, not trusting my voice to keep from cracking. He approached, careful as a bomb tech, and extended a gloved hand. The leather was patched, stitched, and obviously well-used. I took it, and for a moment, his grip was the only stable force in the world.
He helped me to the edge of the overlook, where the stone wall was high enough to serve as a makeshift bench. I sat. The pressure on my ankle made my vision contract to a point, then slowly widen. He squatted down, inspecting the joint with the same detachment I would bring to a broken drone.
“Mind if I check?” he asked.
I shook my head. He rolled my pant leg up, hands steady. The ankle was already ballooning, a cartoon injury, but the skin was intact. He pressed his thumb just below the knob of bone and watched my face.
“Doesn’t feel dislocated. You can move your toes?”
I demonstrated. All digits responded, barely. He nodded, satisfied.
“Sprain. Maybe grade two. You’ll want ice and elevation as soon as possible.” He looked up, eyes dark as carbon. “You got a ride?”
“My car’s at the trailhead,” I said. “I can make it.”
He didn’t say “no, you can’t.” Instead, he straightened and offered his arm again. “Let’s try, then.”
We descended the switchbacks together, him pacing exactly to my limping stride, never once hurrying or sighing or offering any of the little microaggressions people save for the helpless. It was almost worse—being treated with that sort of dignity. The silence between us grew thick, oppressive, as if every word not spoken added weight to the canyon air.
We passed a dead raven near the trailhead, its feathers blown apart in a black halo. I glanced at it and found myself thinking of Schrödinger, of the quantum states between alive and not-alive, of how nothing was ever truly either until the universe bothered to check.
At the parking lot, he let go of my arm and stood at a calculated distance, neither threatening nor retreating. “You’ll make it home?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
He nodded once, then remounted his bike. He watched as I eased myself into the driver’s seat of my ancient Honda, hands trembling only slightly. The engine caught on the second try, and I sat there for a moment, knuckles white on the wheel, staring straight ahead as if some further threat might materialize. The Bloody Scythes biker was already gone, the only evidence of his presence the faint, sharp tang of exhaust and a single black feather stuck in the chain-link by the trailhead.
I drove home in the growing dark, the ache in my ankle replaced by the more familiar, less explicable ache behind myribs. Above the canyon, the lab windows winked in the dusk, each one a tiny eye keeping watch. I felt seen, but not observed—recorded, but not understood. There was a kind of mercy in that.
3
